Roadmap to tracking public energy research investment

The IEA and Mission Innovation recognize the key role of innovation to achieve energy transition, globally; and the importance of tracking progress and developing appropriate metrics to inform policy.

This joint webinar aims to support countries to collect the highest quality energy technology RD&D budget data, with the objective of driving improvements by exchanging experience and practices. 

A wide range of countries make efforts to track their entire national public energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D) activity on an ongoing basis. However, the approaches adopted to collect data vary significantly across countries. To support countries in their data collection, the International Energy Agency published a roadmap to tracking public RD&D budgets in September 2022.

This roadmap describes the variety of country approaches, also identifying the most important common components: the institutional arrangements; the methods for collecting, classifying and validating the data; the data management and technology processes; and, finally, the dissemination. It is intended not only as a guide for countries near the beginning of their journeys towards the collection of energy RD&D, but also for countries with more advanced systems looking to strengthen specific areas. The roadmap is the product of interviews held with representatives of 20 governments between November 2021 and March 2022, and it is indebted to their generosity in sharing their experiences with tracking national energy RD&D spending. Case studies based on the interviews are used to highlight noteworthy methods, while complete national systems descriptions are included in the annex. It is hoped that this publication will serve as a reference and inspiration for experts in this important area of tracking clean energy transitions and that new experiences can be added in the future.